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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Difference Between Love

and the Agony of Waiting

ka with ˙ipek in the hotel room

Ipek did not come straight up and the waiting was torture, the worst Ka had ever known. It was this pain, this deadly wait, he now remembered, that had made him afraid to fall in love. Upon arriving in his room he’d thrown himself on the bed, only to stand up again at once to straighten out his clothes; he washed his hands and felt the blood draining from his arms, his fingers, his lips; with trembling hands he combed his hair and then, seeing his reflection in the windowpane, he messed it up again. As all this had taken very little time, he directed his anxious attention to the scene through his window.

He’d hoped to see Turgut Bey leaving the hotel with Kadife. Perhaps they’d gone past while he was in the bathroom. But if this were the case, Ipek should have come by now. Perhaps she was back in the room he’d ˙ seen the night before, painting her face and dabbing her neck with perfume. What a waste of the little time they had together! Didn’t she understand how much he loved her? Whatever she was doing, it couldn’t justify the pain he felt at this moment; he was going to tell her so when she finally arrived, but would she come at all? With every passing moment, he became more convinced that Ipek had changed her mind. ˙

He saw a horse-drawn carriage come up to the hotel; aided by Zahide Hanım and Cavit the receptionist, Turgut Bey and Kadife climbed in and the carriage’s oilskin drapes closed around them. But the carriage remained still. Ka watched the blanket of snow on the awning get thicker and thicker; the streetlamps made each snowflake look bigger than the one before. It was as if time had stopped, Ka thought; it was driving him mad. Just then Zahide came running out the door and handed something Ka couldn’t see into the carriage. As the carriage began to move, Ka’s heart began to beat faster.

But still Ipek didn’t come. ˙

What was the difference between love and the agony of waiting? Like love, the agony of waiting began in the muscles somewhere around the upper belly but soon spread out to the chest, the thighs, and the forehead, to invade the entire body with numbing force. As he listened to sounds from other parts of the hotel, he tried to guess what Ipek was doing. He saw a ˙ woman passing in the street, and even though she didn’t look a bit like Ipek, ˙ he thought it must be she. How beautiful the snow looked as it fell from the sky! When he was a child, they’d been sent down to the school cafeteria for their injections; as he stood there waiting, hugging his arms as cooking fumes tinged with iodine swirled around his head, his stomach had ached like this and he wanted to die. He wanted to be home, in his own room.

Now he wanted to be in his own miserable room in Frankfurt. What a huge mistake he’d made by coming here! Even the poems had stopped coming. It hurt so much he couldn’t even look at the snow falling onto the empty street. And yet it felt good to be standing at this warm window; this was still better than dying, and if Ipek didn’t come soon, he would die anyway. ˙ The lights went off.

This was a sign, he thought, sent specially to him. Perhaps Ipek hadn’t ˙ come because she knew there was about to be a power outage. He looked down at the dark street for a sign of life, something that might explain Ipek’s absence. He caught sight of a truck—was it an army truck? No, just ˙ his mind playing tricks on him. So were the footsteps he thought he heard on the stairs. No one was coming. He left the window and lay on the bed on his back. The pain that had begun in his belly had now spread to his soul; he was alone in the world with no one to blame but himself.

His life had come to nothing; he was going to die here, die of misery and loneliness. This time he wouldn’t even find the strength to scurry like a rat back into that hole in Frankfurt.

The thing that grieved and distressed him the most was not his terrible unhappiness; it was knowing that, had he acted a bit more intelligently, his entire life might have been much happier. The worst thing was knowing that no one even noticed his fear, his misery, his loneliness. If Ipek had any idea she’d have come right up without delay! If his mother ˙ had seen him in this state . . . she was the only one in the world who would have felt for him; she would have run her fingers through his hair and consoled him.

The ice on the windows gave an orange glow to the light from the streetlamps and the surrounding houses. Let the snow keep falling, he thought; let it fall for days and months on end; let it cover the city of Kars so completely that no one will ever find it again. He wanted to fall asleep on this bed and not wake up until it was a sunny morning and he a child again, with his mother.

There was a knock at the door. By now, Ka told himself, it could only be someone from the kitchen. But he flew to the door, and the moment he opened it he could feel Ipek’s presence. ˙

“Where have you been?”

“Am I late?”

But it was as if Ka hadn’t even heard her. He was already embracing her with all his strength; he’d put his head against her neck and buried his face in her hair, and there he stayed without moving a muscle. He felt such joy that the agony of waiting now seemed absurd. But the agony had worn him out all the same; that, he thought, was why he could not relish her presence fully. That is why he demanded that Ipek explain her delay: ˙ Even knowing he had no right to do so, he kept complaining. But Ipek ˙ insisted that she had come up as soon as her father had left—yes, it was true that she had stopped off in the kitchen to give Zahide one or two instructions about dinner, but that couldn’t have taken more than a minute. So Ka showed himself to be the more ardent and fragile of the two; even at the very beginning of their relationship, he had let Ipek have ˙ the upper hand. And even if his fear of seeming weak had moved him to conceal the agony she’d put him through, he would still have to grapple with feelings of insecurity. Besides, didn’t love mean sharing everything?

What was it if not the desire to share your every thought? He related this chain of thought to Ipek as breathlessly as if revealing a terrible secret. ˙ “Now put all that out of your head,” said Ipek. “I came here to make ˙ love to you.”

They kissed, and with a softness that brought Ka comfort, they fell onto the bed. For Ka, who had not made love in four years, it felt like a miracle. So even as he succumbed to the pleasures of the flesh, his conscious mind was reminding him what a beautiful moment this was. Just as with his first sexual experiences, it was not the act as much as the thought of making love that occupied him. For a while, it protected Ka from overexcitement. Details from the pornographic films to which he’d become addicted in Frankfurt rushed through his head, creating a poetic aura that seemed beyond logic. But he wasn’t imagining these porno graphic scenes to arouse himself; he was celebrating the fact that he could at last enact such fantasies as had played incessantly in his mind. So it was not Ipek herself who was arousing Ka but a pornographic image; and the ˙ miracle was less her presence than the fact that he could imagine his fantasy here in bed with her. It was only when he began to pull off her clothes with an almost savage clumsiness that he began to look at the real Ipek. Her breasts were enormous; the skin on her neck and her shoulders ˙ was wonderfully soft, its scent strange and foreign. He watched the snowlight playing on her; now and again something sparkled in her eyes that frightened him. Her eyes were very sure of themselves: Ka worried that Ipek was not as fragile as he wanted her to be. This is why he pulled her ˙ hair to cause her pain, why he took such pleasure from her pain that he yanked her hair again, why he subjected her to a few other acts also inspired by the pornographic film still playing in his head, and why he treated her so roughly—to the accompaniment of an internal musical sound track as deep as it was primitive. When he saw that she enjoyed his being rough, his triumph gave way to brotherly affection. He wrapped his arms around her; no longer wishing to save just himself from the miseries of Kars, he wanted to save Ipek too. But when he decided her reaction ˙ was commensurate with his ardor, he pulled himself away. In a corner of his mind he was able to control and coordinate these sexual acrobatics with surprising finesse. But when his mind was somewhere far off he could seize the woman with a passion verging on violence; at such a moment he wanted to hurt her.

According to the notes Ka made about his lovemaking—notes I feel I must share with my readers—his passion was finally reciprocated, and they fell upon each other with such intensity as to leave the rest of the world behind. The same notes also reveal that Ipek let out a mournful cry ˙ when it was over. Ka’s native paranoia came rushing back as he wondered whether this was the reason they’d given him a room in the most remote corner of the hotel; the pleasure they’d taken in causing each other pain now gave way to the old loneliness. It seemed to him that this remote room on this remote corridor had split away from the hotel and floated off to the most remote corner of this empty city. And the quiet of this empty city was as if the world had come to an end, and it was snowing.

For a long time they lay side by side in bed, gazing silently at the snow.

From time to time, Ka turned his head to watch the snow falling in Ipek’s ˙ eyes.